This was it. Finally, everyone was working together.

  The heavens had opened up, a deluge falling from the firmament to wipe the world clean. It ran as shimmering mirrors down glass-fronted skscrapers before pooling on the streets, becoming rivers that flowed down the gutters into the earth.

  It swept down my face like a baptism, washing away my sweat and tears to leave only cold certainty behind. My hoodie grew sodden and clammy, sticking to my cybernetic arm until I unzipped it and threw it aside, bearing the full force of the storm in only a tanktop, shoulder webbing and jeans.

  The world was built on smoke and mirrors. On power and the illusion of power, and it was shocking how little difference there was between the two. The looming hand of megacorporate control, the overwhelming force they could bring to bear when threatened, it was all paired with a constant, never-ending barrage of bullshit aimed at keeping people just happy and just desperate enough that they stayed quiet.

  They didn’t go hungry or thirsty. They were flooded with food in infinite varieties and flavours, even if it was all soy hacked and chopped and flavoured and processed into any meal under the sun. What came out of the pipes might not always be drinkable, but that didn’t matter when you could buy litres of soft drinks for cents.

  They didn’t want for entertainment when thousands of trideo programs, terrestrial television and radio stations were waiting at their fingertips, broadcast through every medium imaginable. If they wanted music, it was there for the taking in endlessly fractal sub-genres to suit every conceivable taste, pumped out of studios or generated ex-nihilo by soulless algorithms.

  The landfills were buried beneath cheap plastic toys, the victims of society were shuffled out of sight and mind, the kids with no prospects joined gangs and fought for the dregs of the black market as though it mattered – because the actual market was out of their reach.

  For every problem, there was an outlet. For every hardship there was a way to take the edge off, legally or illegally. For every dream, the magic show of reality conjured up a million petty problems to put it off until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. The whole world was redlining; the great consumer machine pushed to the absolute limit while the foot on the pedal feathered the gas to keep it there.

  But when you run on the edge, it doesn’t take much to fall.

  Calvert had driven the city to the brink, bombing the Chosen’s drugs to make them desperate then fanning the flames as Medhall’s own corporate machine began to shake itself apart. He’d wanted a war, but only on his terms. A clean war between institutions; Knight Errant fighting insurrectionists at the behest of the UCAS government.

  Calvert understood how the world worked, could see the fragile pillars propping up our sixth world society, but in the end he was still its agent. He wanted to keep control throughout the chaos, emerging from the dust with the strings in his mouth and a clean win for Evo. One corporation stepping smoothly into the shoes of the other. He didn’t understand what he’d really done. Perhaps he couldn’t.

  Everyone in the city had seen the Anders leak, even if the information was filtered through the biases of their media bubbles. Everyone remembered the horrors of the New Revolution, the chaos of Crash 2.0. That collective trauma had been dragged to the forefront of their minds in the very instant before the world ended again.

  I’d levelled the city, cast everyone into the dark and shown them just how hollow their societal comforts were. I’d taken away their electricity, grounded their cars, stripped them of the jangling keys of constant social media. Their information overload was frozen in the last moments before the blackout, when they’d been told that Max Anders had betrayed them.

  There would be no media spin, no controlled release of information as Knight Errant wove a reassuring narrative around their counterinsurrection. Everyone in the city knew what the problem was, but I’d cut the feeds before they could be shown a solution. All they knew was that their city was burning and nobody was doing a thing to stop it.

  What I’d unleashed couldn’t be controlled. It was the horrifying momentum of history, that irrepressible force that rose periodically to destroy the old, leaving a barren land in which the new could be built.

  It was inevitable that people would lose focus, that their unrestrained energy would lash out like lightning leaping through ionised air to an antennae. That was part of it; the unrestrained violence that was both the symptom and cause of change. The procession around me burned with hatred for Medhall, but surrounded by so many symbols of corporate power and wealth each darkened skyscraper became a vulnerable enemy.

  The rain crackled as it met the conflagration that had consumed the fourth floor of the building next to me, where looters had broken through into an abandoned office building. They wouldn’t make it far without the main force of the march behind them. I didn’t have any sympathy; if they were so easily distracted by baubles then they’d be useless when the real fighting begun. If anything, they were in my way.

  Whether acting in desperation in the face of the looters or just blind panic at the sight of the march, some of the security officers sheltering in the other towers began to lose their nerve. Steel shutters were pulled down over the doors, with facilities staff in branded coveralls using power tools to cut through the dead motors and counterweights. Where that wasn’t an option, they pulled desks to the doors, or cut the brakes of abandoned cars so they could roll them up and tip them on their side.

  All the while they watched us, dozens of jumpy rent-a-cops with live ammo and fingers twitching on triggers. The first shots were an inevitability, a panicked burst fired through a third floor window. I didn’t see where the bullets fell, but I heard the crowd screaming in response before a torrent of gunfire engulfed the buildings around us.

  Those without guns started to run, adrenaline and the press of the crowd behind them forcing them forward as they slammed against barricades or spilled into lobbies. Whether the corporate security stood dumbstruck or fired into the crowd seemed to make no difference; they quickly disappeared from view between heaving muscle and muzzle flashes.

  To my relief, most of the crowd surged forwards through the gauntlet, only occasionally directing shots and rocks and Molotov cocktails at the buildings around us. They kept their focus fixed on the looming tower ahead of us. Lung didn’t even react; the barrel of his gun remained pointed skywards as he strode unerringly towards his target.

  I was almost jogging, Imp keeping pace by my side. We’d never led the crowd, but now it was starting to outpace us. Whatever moment of recognition I’d been given had disappeared beneath a metahuman flood. Even Lung was being left behind by the mass now; I could see him marching on at the same pace a dozen metres away, a shoal of people parting around him like a stream breaking around a stone.

  Gradually the gunfire began to die down, replaced by faint screams as rioters rampaged through the offices around us. I wondered how far they’d get; how many flights of stairs would they be able to climb before they started to tire? Were the wageslaves inside even now be making for higher ground, or were they being ushered out through other doors onto quieter streets? Did they even know, huddled in their blacked-out cubicles or gathered in a worried mass in the isolated battery farms of open-plan offices?

  All I knew was that the march would continue without that distraction. We’d lost some stragglers, but the mass was still cohesive. It was perhaps callous to think of them as a metahuman battering ram to get me through the gates of Medhall, but I hadn’t manufactured this hate. It was always there, simmering beneath the surface. I’d just given it an outlet.

  To my relief, the next block was silent, its offices already shuttered and barred. We’d hit the edge of the evacuation zone around Medhall’s head office; two Knight Errant cars blocked the road, along with a line of collapsable barriers, but there were no officers in sight.

  Beyond that flimsy border, which was quickly overturned, the abandoned buildings acted like a canyon, funnelling the metahuman river inexorably towards our destination. There were still those who tried to force their way into the surrounding offices, but the retreating corporations had been given time to seal them tight with storm shutters and great steel barriers bolted to the concrete.

  “What’s the play?” Imp asked, her hand teasing at the flap of her holster.

  “I know where in the building they are,” I said. “When this crowd breaks through the siege there’s going to be chaos. We’ll slip aside and rescue them.”

  “If they break through,” Imp pointed out. “I see a lot of people, but not a lot of firepower. This could get ugly.”

  “We can’t turn them back.”

  “Fuck that,” Imp snapped. “They want to fight, that’s their right. It’s fuckin’ karma.”

  The intensity in her tone cut me to the core; it was so unlike her usual carefree attitude. All the while, her hand looked to be an instant from drawing her tomahawk. Like the crowd, she wanted blood.

  A noise from the end of the block drew my attention; a throaty roar echoing through the dead city.

  “Fuck is it?” Imp asked, straining to look over the crowd as a motorcycle spun onto the block, its driver wasp-like in a yellow and black biker suit.

  “Knight Errant,” I said, as the biker swerved his vehicle into a slide that killed his momentum, kicking one leg down onto the pavement as he watched the approaching mob with what must have been a mixture of amazement and horror. “I guess they’re using bike couriers to communicate.”

  With another roar, the courier sped off down the street just as the leading edge of the march drew close enough to throw a few bricks at his retreating form. For a moment I thought they were going to rush after him, but then the resonance well pulsed again.

  They couldn’t see what I saw, that great wave of energy washing over the city like an atomic inferno, but they felt it in the hum of static electricity and the chemical tang of burned out wires as long-dead streetlights tried to burn bright again.

  I’d almost forgotten I was looking into the matrix. The city was dead, or at least this part of it was. The great corporate hosts had been consumed by LEVIATHAN, burned out by the dragon or warped and smeared into ambient resonance by the repeating blast waves.

  All that was left was a desolate plain thick with resonance that hung in the air like motes of dust. If I focused, I could just barely make out the pathways of the man-made networks that had been reduced to those dust clouds, but with every pulse they grew fainter.

  Bathed in the atomic light of the resonance well, any shape they might have had was washed out by its brilliant light. If it was in meatspace, it’d probably have burned out my eyes by now.

  Even as the trailing edge of the crowd continued to trade gunfire with the corporate security behind us, the leading edge began to regain some semblance of its cohesiveness. Ahead of us, those who’d rushed ahead started to slow, drifting back in threes and fours before they met the bulk of the crowd. We could smell cordite in the air, could hear distant gunfire coming from in front as well as behind.

  Battle hung in the air; an ionised cloud of potential violence hanging like a pall over the streets. We became a march again, flocking around the banners like some bronze age army even as the digital war continued to tear through the city.

  As I turned back to take in the scale of the crowd, I saw LEVIATHAN and the dragon dancing among distant hosts that hadn’t yet been snuffed out by my monster’s hunger. The dragon’s flames torched whole swathes of the digital cityscape as she built a firebreak around LEVIATHAN, starving the datavore of the code it needed to expand its consciousness.

  DemiGOD’s hovered above the battle like fireflies, rendered miniscule by distance. I watched as the dragon’s flames licked at their heels, forcing the pinpricks of light to soar up and clear of the battlefield. Other DemiGODs were nearer to me, getting as close as they dared to the resonance well with their personas layered in firewalls and active monitoring systems. I could see them staggered out around the well like a net, but I doubted they could pick me out among the resonant mass pouring out of the breach.

  Then Imp’s hand was on my shoulder, bringing me back to the here and now.

  A metahuman wall stretched along an intersection ahead of us, a black and yellow barricade of riot shields, faceless helmets and two armoured trucks that had been pushed into place. A commander stood on top of one vehicle, lit from below by the off-tempo flashes of red and blue lights as he watched our progress. I could see the outline of the truck in the matrix, its digital structure warped and mutated into resonant constructs that had crystalised into immobility.

  They weren’t blocking our path, in fact it looked like they’d deliberately moved out of our way, shifting their positions to the side so that we’d march right past them. Behind the shield wall – which looked more ragged every step I took towards it – I could just glimpse a team of medics working out of the back of a boxy truck, lit by flashlights that had been lashed to the half-open door.

  “What happened to the perimeter?” I asked the air.

  “I think we’re looking at it,” Imp said. “Cops are cowards. They’re not gonna fuck with us when we’re clearly gonna fuck with the guys they hate.”

  “Maybe…” I mused. “Still, I thought they’d put up more of a fight.”

  As we drew closer, the picture only became more ragged. The shields were all new, like they’d just been taken out of the back of the van, but they were conspicuous in their intact state. The officers carrying them looked beaten-down, the yellow visors of their full-face helmets cracked and splintered by repeated blows while their taksuits were stitched together in places by puffy globules of counterseptic adhesive spray.

  Half of them had rifles slung on their backs and more had been piled in a heap by the wall. I could see the latter in the matrix, biometric ID locks and battlenet friendly fire countermeasures frozen in place by the first wave of resonance, before the failsafes had brought the rest of their weapons offline.

  I fucked them, I thought to myself. Disarmed half the force as collateral damage.

  I wanted to shrink down into the crowd, terrified that one of them would recognise me and the whole line would surge forwards with what bullets they had left to snatch me from the mob. If any of them did, they were too busy licking their wounds to do anything about it. For every officer on the line, there were four more in various states of injury on the tarmac behind them. It was a field hospital, not a military camp.

  A few hundred metres down the road we passed the first signs of the enemy. A Knight Errant truck was burning on the sidewalk, its armoured cabin sheared open by successive blows from some high-powered gun. Most of the crew were lying dead on the ground around the vehicle, but one had survived the initial blast.

  They'd ripped his helmet off his head, looped a chain around his neck and tossed the other end over a streetlight. His feet were swaying in the air currents of this man-made chasm three metres over my head, the other end of the chain lashed around the truck's rear axle.

  The fighting sounded tremendously close now. I could see the people around me start to slow as proximity to the battle began to wear away at the thrilling adrenaline that had carried them here. It was impossible to feel invincible beneath a hanged man.

  First contact with the enemy came like a bolt from a clear sky, three aged pick-up trucks following a fifty-year-old Humvee around the corner of the block, their beds packed with at least a dozen hangers-on from the Chosen's vassal gangs. The driver of the Humvee slowed at the sudden sight of the mob, before gunning the accelerator and heading straight for us.

  I tried to get a bead on him, but the crowd around me shifted like a wave in response to the threat, almost knocking me off my feet. Across the metahuman sea I could barely make out Lung striding out from the head of the crowd. He stopped dead in the path of the speeding Humvee, lowered his heavy machinegun and squeezed the trigger.

  The tungsten projectiles shredded through its engine block as Lung guided his shots down to the axel, shearing off both left wheels in a shower of sparks. The Humvee kept going on momentum alone, sliding along the asphalt as its speed rapidly dropped. It was still going far too fast, but Lung didn't even seem concerned. He simply swept his gun to the right, splintering the windshields of two of the pickups and pulping those within in a spray of vaporised gore.

  Once the Humvee finally reached him, now crawling along the tarmac without the tyres on its remaining wheels, the immense troll leapt up onto what was left of the engine block and fired down into the cabin at point black range. Every move he'd made had been almost automatic, like he was just going through the motions while his mind was elsewhere.

  He'd still moved faster than anyone else, but it didn't take long for the crowd to catch up. I couldn't see exactly who shot up the remaining two pickups, but bit by bit they disintegrated under a withering hail of fire, shedding bodies from their beds.

  The militiamen were barely able to get any shots off, but as we surged forwards I found myself stepping over the twitching form of an elven woman in yakuza colours, deep red flowers blooming around the bulletholes in her shirt. Her arm was broken, the bone poking through the skin. She was being trampled, the crowd rolling over her without the power to stop itself.

  Then were in it. Medhall’s tower loomed overhead like a monument, a pillar of ditgital flame that drowned out all I could see. The convoy had been some scrambled-together attempt at a flanking manoeuvre, pulling back and looping around to hit Knight Errant from behind. Instead, we ran right into them.

  It was once a siege, I could see that much. The walls were still there, with armoured Knight Errant trucks parked side-on at one intersection and a line of makeshift barricades stretched across the other, built from sheets of metal, ambulances and whatever cars the insurrectionists had brought with them.

  Between them was a monument to corporate triumph; a whole block given over to a combined park and plaza, with flagstone paths winding between gardens and fountains, climbing over artificial rivers or descending down to cafes and restaurants built beneath the surface. There was no disharmony in it; every stone monument and abstract metal statue had been designed to fit in seamlessly with the rest, commissioned according to the whims of the man whose building fronted onto the plaza.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The crown jewel of Richard Anders’ kingdom had become a no-mans land, his great torn apart in a meandering mess of makeshift barricades and pillboxes while the ornamental and decorative terrain became a trench network two hundred metres across. The light of burning trees and muzzle flashes illuminated the horrific melee that had spread across the whole plaza, reflecting off glossy yellow helmets and the bare metal of cybernetics.

  Whatever division the rival barricades represented has collapsed in rapid waves of attack and counterattack as Knight Errant and the New Revolutionaries responded to the digital blackout. They were still fighting; scattered groups moving from feature to feature, descending into quick and bloody melees wherever they met each other.

  Over the heads of the crowd I saw taksuited officers rushing forwards with batons and lengths of pipe, while those with functional weapons covered their advance. Chosen cyborgs darted across the battlefield with mechanical speed, hacking into officers with in-built blades and pinpoint shots from heavy pistols.

  The militia were less organised, thronging the field in their hundreds – if not thousands – as they fought beneath a fluttering field of stars and stripes. Many were as disarmed as Knight Errant, charging in with hatchets and machetes as they joined the pandemonic melee that had spread across the battlefield. It was a bloodbath on an immense scale, so violent and intense that most didn’t even notice our arrival.

  Our charge was heralded by a strange tugging sensation, as though the entire mass of people stretched out and compressed back in on itself. The fanatics and the killers at the front of our march rushed ahead, firing blindly or taking advantage of the open road to zig-zag forwards on cybernetic limbs. Those at the rear heard the rising clamour of battle and surged forwards, forcing everyone in-between to press on or get trampled. Within twenty seconds, we were all sprinting.

  I lost sight of Imp as she darted ahead, a flick of her arm snapping the head of her collapsed tomahawk into place. Ahead of us, stretched across the line of disabled Knight Errant cars, snipers in taksuits and fabric uniforms were taking potshots at the militia with marksmen rifles, aiming by eye with their expensive smartscopes dismounted and abandoned.

  They barely had time to turn before the first of us hit them, the line of officers immediately disappearing from view as the metahuman tsunami washed over them. I was jostled to the side by an ork with a meat cleaver, losing sight of the battlefield as I almost stumbled and fell.

  It meant I didn’t see the moment we fully joined the battle, just the bodies dropping around me as some unseen enemy unloaded a machine gun into our ranks. A dwarf fell to the floor before me, her skull shattered by a stray shot. I tripped over her body, almost losing my grip on my gun as I slammed into the floor, crawling manically forward towards the bulky form of an armoured truck that had been left abandoned in no-mans-land.

  I blinked away my shock, watching with mute horror as all our invincible fury was met by the cold realities of war. I’d deluded myself into thinking I was above it; that I was an outside observer taking advantage of others’ rage. Instead, my own hot fury came crashing down in this throwback of a battle, this bronze age clash of peoples that could only end in mutual massacre.

  But as I’d done before, in the dopadrine bombing that had set all of this into motion, with my team pinned down by Chosen and the matrix cut off, I knew I had to fight through my fear. I rose to my feet, locked my cybernetic fingers to my pistol grip, and stepped out into the open.

  I didn’t even see the first man I shot. He was just a flash of a camouflaged jacket cresting a barricade ten metres ahead of me, with the black outline of a rifle raised to fire. As he jerked back under a burst of submachine gun rounds I sprinted forwards, moving my legs as fast as my pounding heart would allow before throwing myself behind the scant cover of that same barricade.

  Others had followed me; an ork in grey camouflage with an Eye of Sauron daubed across his face in red warpaint was hunched over next to a Yakuza razorgirl with glossy red limbs and a porcelain-white faceplate. The ork was holding a shotgun in one hand, while the other brought a grenade up to his teeth. He looped the pin around one tusk and pulled it clear, then threw the grenade blindly over our cover.

  The razorgirl leapt up the moment it detonated, her cybernetic legs propelling her almost faster than I could see. I followed with the ork, hauling myself up and over the barricade just in time to see a militiaman in an American flag bandanna bisected by the razorgirl’s katana.

  Beside me, the ork levelled his shotgun and fired on automatic into a cluster of Revolutionaries. I leapt down to the other side of the barricade, back beneath the cover of a fountain whose stone wall had been shattered by the force of the grenade, spilling out pristine water to mingle with the rain that had drowned the world.

  Dead militia groaned beneath me, one of them grasping at a gun before I kicked him in the head hard enough I heard his neck snap. Others were on their feet, scrambling to aim their weapons before my own arm snapped up with mechanical speed. As I squeezed the trigger I panned the gun to the left, spraying automatic rounds across half a dozen men and women.

  The magazine clicked empty. I threw myself down beneath the edge of the fountain, water pouring over my shoulders as I fumbled with the catch. Something heavy fell down beside me; the ork, his mouth opening wordlessly as blood seeped through the bulletholes in his jacket.

  It was enough to shock me into action, discarding the spent magazine and slotting in another before letting the slide fly forwards. Distantly, I knew I didn’t have many rounds left, but there was nowhere to go but forwards.

  So I got to my feet, keeping my head low to avoid drawing the eye of whatever distant gunman had shot the ork on top of the barricade. The razorgirl was still there, withdrawing her katana from the torso of a militiaman. Idly I noticed that her cyberlegs had no feet, instead ending in points like her every step was part of some twisted ballet. As I watched she raised a spiked leg and drove it through the torso of one of the wounded, the pointed tip crushing through his ribcage with a horrific crackle.

  Suddenly she shifted, hunching down with her head cocked as her inbuilt sensors assessed the battlefield, effective even without any connection to the Yakuza’s own tactical networks. With a fluid motion she brought her left hand around and drew a pistol from a shoulder holster, double-tapping a figure climbing over a slope of rubble before darting off in the direction they’d come from, vaulting the slope in a single bound.

  I followed her, desperate not to be left alone on this anarchic battlefield. I scrambled up the barricade, rolling over the top of the heap of cinderblocks and flagstones that could have been torn up from the plaza itself before stumbling to my feet on the other side right as the sole surviving Knight Errant officer shot her in the head.

  There had been four of them sheltering in this bandstand turned foxhole, before she’d cut them apart with clawed hands and the edge of her sword. The last was barely upright, his legs shaking as his body caught up to the katana that had been run through his torso.

  He was wearing a uniform, rather than the usual concealing taksuit and helmet, which meant he was some city centre beat cop who’d been caught up in this rapid insurrection. He was tall, elven, his fine features frozen in mute horror as he stared uncomprehendingly at the hilt jutting out of his chest. When he saw me he staggered back until he hit the edge of the bandstand, jerking in shock as the tip of the sword made contact with the rubble.

  I wanted to plead with him, but when his hand jerkily raised his pistol towards me I simply rushed at him, knocking his gun aside with my own before bringing my pistol grip down onto his forehead and throwing him to the ground with my other arm.

  I didn’t stop to watch him bleed out, instead risking another death-defying scramble over the rubble as I continued my miserable march from cover to cover, throwing myself to the floor once again as I was suddenly caught in a shooting gallery between a band of Chosen and some of my rioters, incandescent tracers cutting through the rain as I crawled behind the relative safety of a long concrete bench.

  The immediate gunfire quickly died off, with the last tracers coming from the Chosen side of the firefight. I rolled onto my back, clutching my pistol in both hands as I waited for the first of the cyberpsychos to round the corner.

  As I lay there in a state of adrenaline-fuelled hyperawareness, my eyes were drawn to a shape cutting through the rain towards the battlefield, flanked on either side by the towering canyon of skyscrapers that stretched off back towards the north. It was a helicopter, its fuselage a familiar green and white.

  Then a Chosen woman edged past the bench, an assault rifle raised and ready to fire. My shots struck her in the torso, initially skittering off her subdermal armour before piercing through as plates dismounted with the cracking of splintered composite. As she dropped to one knee I rose, already firing at the second cyborg just behind her.

  I felt the gun click empty as a stab in the chest, staring in mute horror at the Chosen who was already drawing a bead on me with his own rifle, the synthskin on his head peeled back to reveal the steel skull surrounding his optics.

  I was frozen in a single moment that stretched into infinity, ice gripping my heart as though it had already stopped beating. I could see everything in that moment; every imperfection in the cyborg’s synthskin, the steam rising from the superheated barrel of his rifle. I saw his inhuman eye widen in a sympathetic pain response as the tomahawk struck above his clavicle.

  Imp pounced on him like a grey demon, knocking him to the floor in a football tackle before tearing her axe from his chest and driving it into his torso again and again, each withdrawal ripping out another spurt of oily synthetic blood. As she stood and turned to look at me that black ichor ran down the hydrophobic surface of her suit, droplets pooling around her eyesockets like tears.

  “Sorry I got ahead of you there,” she said, holding out a hand to help me up. “It’s just… fuck it feels good to fight back.”

  I accepted her hand, pawing over my magazines with the other as I searched fruitlessly for the tell-tale glint of a ceramic casing. I was completely out.

  With a weary sigh I holstered my pistol, my eye drawn skywards once again as the helicopter roared over the battlefield, the downwash of its rotors enough to kick up a concrete duststorm even as panicked volleys of tracer rounds criss-crossed its path.

  “That who I think it is?” Imp asked.

  “Calvert’s second team,” I said, watching as it swung left around the tower in a helical ascent. “Or what’s left of them, mixed in with his own guys. It’s a hell of a Hail Mary.”

  It was the first time I’d properly looked at the skyscraper since joining the melee. It felt so tantalisingly close, yet its sheer scale gave it a height that seemed unassailable. It loomed over us all, the logo at its pinnacle like an eye disinterestedly staring down at the ants fighting at its feet. I could picture Max Anders standing at a window on the uppermost floor, trying to follow the ebb and flow of this second Ragnar?k.

  Then, one by one, lights started to flow across the tower as the resonance well pulsed again, sending a wave of etheric energies across a battlefield blind to its radiant light. Some threshold had been reached within the tower’s systems, some artefact of LEVIATHAN’s breach in the event horizon that had seen the tower converted, rather than destroyed.

  It was a digital metamorphosis, code mutating into something else while keeping its original function. The tower’s electricity grid was now the roots of Yggdrasil, carrying energy to the great clumps of resonance that flowered on the world tree’s branches. It had spread to the plaza, too, that first explosion of energy infecting digital systems with enough power to convert them wholesale before bringing them offline.

  I could see etheric moss growing from the crumpled bodies of Chosen cyborgs whose augmentations had become its substrate. The effect hadn’t spread far, only a hundred metres from the world tree, but I wondered how many Chosen I’d killed to fertilise the new ecosystem taking shape around me, flourishing in digital carcasses and filling the air with its pollen.

  Imp was at my side again, eyeing our surroundings warily as though more gunmen could descend on us at any time. I knelt down over the Chosen woman I’d killed, prying metal fingers from her assault rifle. With my own cybernetic hand I pressed my thumb against the trigger guard until it snapped off before trying to find a way to comfortably hold the undersized weapon. It was like a child’s toy.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s… intense out there.”

  “Yeah, well, get with the here and now. Only way out is through.”

  Her words were punctuated by the crackle of some heavy-calibre machine gun uncomfortably close to us. I couldn’t place the direction as it echoed across this violent labyrinth, but I didn’t have an Adept’s ears. Imp quickly scurried away through the rubble, though this time I could tell she was deliberately slowing her pace so that I could keep up.

  I followed her into cover behind a decorative planter whose verdant green shrubbery had impossibly clung to life throughout the battle and the storm. Beyond this flimsy barricade was an expansive plaza twenty metres across, a tantalising environment when compared to the trenches around us.

  The only barrier were the pair of Medhall ambulances parked halfway across – now host to a flourishing colony of resonant growth – and the dozens of gang members, a handful of paramilitary soldiers and Chosen officers massing them all for an assault into no-man’s-land.

  They were scared, or at least the baseline humans were, but I recognised their cold terror. It was that of cornered animals, knowing that they had only one way forwards but still afraid of exposing themselves to danger. Most of them didn’t even have guns, instead clutching whatever blades and lengths of pipe they’d had to hand.

  Beside me Imp cocked her head at some distant signal only she could pick up. Moments later I started to hear it too; the pounding of feet and a hundred shouted exclamations as men and women drove each other forwards. The march had caught up with us, or some segment of it that had survived the battlefield to reach this far.

  As they streamed past our cover onto the plaza we leapt up to join them, pushing through the shrubbery with ease before breaking into a dead sprint as the assembled militia’s shock turned into fury.

  They charged right back at us, two masses of metahumanity rushing at each other in a mess so jumbled that neither side was able to get more than a handful of shots off. We met the enemy with explosive force, the world descending into a bloody throng of hatchets and clubs punctuated by the occasional burst of gunfire.

  I saw Imp flow through the battlefield like a dancer, ducking low to drive her tomahawk into the knees of three gang members in quick succession before jolting upright and using her weight to barrel over a paramilitary woman with a shotgun.

  They fell to the floor together, Imp driving her tomahawk into the woman’s neck before rising and throwing it at a Chosen cyborg, the weapon lodging in his chest and knocking him back just long enough for her to draw her pistol with her left hand and fire a volley of shots into his head before rushing forward and retrieving her axe.

  With every kill, I heard her shout a name. Circus, Whirligig, Trainwreck, a litany of the dead avenged with every kill. I followed in her wake, trying to ration the rifle’s ammunition as I gunned down targets over the heads of orks, dwarves and elves. In the end, though, it wasn’t enough.

  The Chosen had a razorgirl of their own, carving her way behind the blurred lines of the conflict with forearm-length blades jutting out of her wrists. I saw the moment she recognised me, the glowing red optic suite that replaced her eyes locking onto me with baleful attention as she redoubled her massacre. I staggered back, only to run into the wall of bodies around me.

  When she brought her cyberspur down I threw up the rifle, feeling the bone-shaking shock of her blade making contact with the metal before lodging in place most of the way through. It was enough force to knock the gun out of my hand entirely, my own momentum carrying my arm forwards as it brushed against her own.

  In that moment, I felt a spark of energy pass between us. I grasped it like a lifeline, locking my cybernetic hand to her arm as I sent a flood of resonant spikes through into her offline nervous system. I’d been gentle when I’d lain my hands on the wounded cyborg, before I’d linked up with this insane march, but now I poured my hate through her every synapse, watching with sadistic satisfaction as her optics flickered out of existence before her augmented nervous system overloaded in a shower of sparks and burning flesh.

  I stopped trying to keep my distance, instead charging ahead and relying on my natural strength to batter away the unaugmented chaff as I hunted down Chosen one by one, burning out their nervous systems through their man-machine interfaces and leaving their twitching bodies in my wake. Imp quickly realised what I was doing, effortlessly navigating her way back to me through the melee before covering me as we carved a path through, the rioters following in our wake.

  We were almost through when the world was drowned again beneath the throaty roar of antique engines barely clinging to life. Two angular green behemoths had pulled onto the square, their eight wheels cresting a scree of rubble with ease as the stubby machine guns bolted to the top of the hull swivelled to face the melee.

  The turrets were a mess of smoke launchers built around a single spherical optic, looking almost like an afterthought hastily thrown on top of the armoured body of the APCs. They were as antiquated as the flags flying from their hull, no doubt embezzled from post-Ghost Dance stockpiles over half a century ago, but they predated the modern matrix. They were immune to my virus.

  The guns opened up on the crowd, accompanied by a hail of smoke grenades that cut through the rain. I tried to scramble out of their path, saved from their wrath only by just how many enemies were surrounding Imp and I, but I was caught in the middle of the crowd, between both fields of fire.

  In desperation I turned my eyes to the resonance, sending a tight-beam transmission to the life colonising one of the ambulances that was a little way off behind enemy lines. The nascent life there responded to my song, rapidly multiplying as it grew to fill its shell like a crab.

  I didn’t even have to instruct it. Its protosapient intelligence took shape from the hardware it could touch; the sirens, overpowered engine and GridLink overrides. It came to life with the squeal of tyres on concrete, ramming through the human host as fast as its engine would bear before crashing into the side of the leftmost APC.

  Imp and I took our chance, rushing through the melee as the ancient APC was shunted back by the modern paramedic’s up-armoured ambulance. The mob behind us might be able to push through and disable the other one, tearing open the hatch to get at the gooey centre within, but neither of us were willing to take that chance. We scurried off the plaza, descending a set of stone stairs into a sunken part of the park.

  We found ourselves in a boutique mall built around an ever-blossoming cherry tree, the upmarket shops having remarkably survived the war raging on the surface. The only intrusion on the comparative oasis were the bodies sprawled around the tree in black and yellow gear speckled with pink blossoms.

  They were tactical officers, wearing thicker armour than usual and mostly armed with submachine guns. I rushed over at the sight of those, undoing webbing pouches and replacing my Ares-standard sickle magazines with their own. After a moment’s morbid hesitation I turned my attention to the largest officer, a female troll whose left horn had been shattered by the high-powered shots that had torn through her skull.

  I fumbled to extricate her from her armoured vest, peeling off the Knight Errant patches before putting it on under my shoulder webbing. The vest had half a dozen pouches around its waist, each holding a bulky peak-discharge battery; fuel for the two-pronged gauss rifle she’d had slung over her shoulder.

  It was dead weight, its advanced systems riddled with resonant fungus, but as I curled my fingers around its troll-sized pistol grip I sang to that growth and watched it flourish until I was holding a leashed animal bristling with killing intent.

  A fresh sound cut through the battlefield, the pounding hammer-blows of a twin rotor helicopter roaring overhead, its nominal allegiance displayed in its black fuselage and yellow trim even as it ignored the beleaguered Knight Errant remnants below.

  “Firewatch!” I exclaimed, guessing wildly. I could barely believe they’d managed to get one of their helicopters airborne.

  The immense Ares Dragon flew directly at the front of Medhall’s tower and for a moment I thought the two were going to collide before the pilot pulled back into a vertical climb that seemed impossible to my inexpert eyes. It rose up the side of the skyscraper on momentum alone before swinging its fuselage around as it stalled at the pinnacle of its ascent, landing out of sight on the roof of the building.

  Something exploded off in the distance, a thundercrack followed by the firework crackle of detonating ammunition. I tightened my grip on the gauss rifle, my gaze alternating between the bodies at my feet and the towering skyscraper above me.

  “This is Hell!” I shouted through the secondary explosions, all my fear spilling out of me in a single exclamation. “It’s arma-fucking-geddon – and it’ll only get worse inside!”

  “No other way,” Imp said, though even her relentless confidence sounded strained. “Nothing we can do but go forwards.”

  I took a step back, squeezing my eyes shut as though I could will myself away from this catastrophe. When I opened them again I looked around wildly, almost seeing the battlefield for the first time. I gazed with astonishment at the buildings around the plaza, at how half of them were as well-lit as Max Anders’ tower.

  “Fuck!” I shouted, then again for emphasis. “Fuck!”

  This whole district was that family’s castle. It was the epicentre of their power and control, designed from the ground up by a man who’s life mission was the Reconquista of America. He was the architect of all of this. No wonder this plaza had become such a natural battlefield; it had been designed for a siege.

  But Medhall was a company first and foremost; an organism that had spread itself throughout the whole city. More than that, the two had grown together. One building would never be enough to contain its brain, even one as immense as the tower before me. It needed annexes, outbuildings, and they all needed connections to function.

  I could see tunnels stretched across the plaza below my feet, visible as impressions only through glowing tendrils of light, where the breach in the matrix had spilled through fibre-optic cables that had been grandfathered into Medhall’s wireless host. It was below our feet, woven across the plaza in a root system of access corridors and cables dug into the earth. I followed the trail up, mentally charting a path down from the backrooms of this Medhall-owned tourist boutique.

  “Come on,” I shouted, waving Imp over to a staff only door that had been partially concealed in a wall. Beyond was a simple narrow staircase descending into a well-lit tunnel that flourished with resonant life.

  I paused at the threshold, taking in one last look at the looming tower and trying to picture the unseen battle happening at its pinnacle. As I watched, a sudden explosion tore across the penultimate floor, spilling out into the air in a firestorm of uncontained magical energies.

  Max Anders was dead.